Touching Freud's Dog

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Notes

notes

My thanks to reviewer Sarah Wood for her helpful comments on this article.

1 H.D., Tribute 98.

2 According to H.D., the first thing Freud says to her is “You are the only person who has ever come into this room and looked at the things in the room before looking at me” (ibid.).

3 Freud, Studies on Hysteria II: 49; hereafter parenthesised as SE.

4 For a history of Freud's use of touch, see Smith; and Beckenridge. For touch in psychotherapy more generally, see Older.

5 During later hypnosis, Freud discovered that her strange demands “related to the fact that the animal shapes which appeared to her when she was in a bad state started moving and began to attack her if anyone made a movement in her presence” (SE II: 56). The “final injunction ‘Don’t touch me!’,” Freud explained, derived from an experience when her brother, unwell from too much morphine, would “seize hold of her” (56).

6 Jones 448.

7 Anzieu, The Skin Ego 139.

8 Derrida, On Touching 66.

9 John 20.17.

10 Nancy, Noli Me Tangere 12. Reflecting on the many ways that “Noli me tangere” has been interpreted in the arts and medicine, Nancy insists, “Few phrases from the Gospels have been so widely disseminated” (109). For further readings of Christ's prohibition on touch, see Baross; Derrida, On Touching; and Manning.

11 Matt. 8.3 cited in Derrida, On Touching 100.

12 Friedman, Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D. 100; hereafter parenthesised as Letters. Following Friedman, I present these letters without correction to spelling or grammar.

13 H.D., Tribute 98.

14 Nancy, Corpus 93.

15 Montagu 28–29.

16 The dog collar refers to Bryher's desire for acceptance into the psychoanalytic fold.

17 Perdita Macpherson Schaffner (born Frances Perdita Aldington), H.D.'s daughter to Cecil Gray, was adopted by Bryher and Macpherson.

18 See Letters 192–93.

19 Referring to Perdita's adoption.

20 See Letters 52.

21 Cixous, “Love of the Wolf” 124.

22 Connor 259.

23 Stokes 370.

24 Maclachlan 58.

25 Nancy, Corpus 57.

26 Maclachlan 58.

27 Nancy, Corpus 51.

28 Baross 150.

29 Cixous, “Writing Blind” 188.

30 Cixous with Calle-Gruber 49.

31 “Closeup” refers to cinema's first art journal, edited by Macpherson (and greatly aided by H.D.).

32 Montagu 102.

33 Anzieu, A Skin for Thought 78–79.

34 Cixous, Three Steps 36.

35 H.D., “The Pool” in Collected Poems 56; hereafter parenthesised as CP.

36 Hollenberg 75.

37 See Martz's account of H.D.'s shift away from Imagist principles and Greek mythology (xix).

38 Nancy, Corpus 11.

39 See Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language 34.

40 Kristeva, Desire in Language 136.

41 See Pound.

42 H.D., “Sagesse” in Hermetic Definition.

43 H.D., Tribute 148.

44 Pearson v.

45 Cixous, “Writing Blind” 195.

46 Hill cited in Katz 31.

47 “It remains perhaps to think of laughter, as, precisely, a remains. What does laughter want to say? What does laughter want? [Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire, le rire? Qu’est-ce que ça veut reire?]” (Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone” cited in Royle 64).

48 Derrida and Ferraris 13.

49 Anzieu, The Skin Ego 61–62.